It’s been a while since we’ve posted a new entry in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.)

In today’s Verbatim entry, Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviews Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, one of Ottawa’s leading non-partisan advocate groups. With their slogan “the system is the scandal,” Democracy Watch aims to identify, publicize, and pressure for the closure of legislative loopholes that allow waste, corruption, and abuse of power by elected officials and civil servants. Here, Duff and Nick talk about the lobby culture of Parliament Hill, Democracy Watch’s highly successful media strategy, and Ralph Nader’s pivotal role in starting the group.

As always, the original podcast is freely available for your listening pleasure here.

Q&A:

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: We’re sitting here in an Ottawa office. We’re only a few blocks from Parliament Hill. And you’re a guy who is a government watchdog—government ethics, government accountability…

Duff Conacher: Yes.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: How can you possibly have any work to do these days?

Duff Conacher: [Laughs] Too much, unfortunately, and always have been for the last sixteen-and-a-half years, just because we’ve lacked the resources we really need to do the job. So we’ve just tried to work smart instead of trying to dabble in everything. Usually, if you dabble, you don’t make much change. And instead, we work smart and choose the real avenues where there’s a real opportunity—a window open—to really make change.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So where are those avenues?

Duff Conacher: Well, the big one now, in terms of policy making, is—it looks like we’re heading towards having another Accountability Act—some way, it being introduced. The Conservative government won’t, because they stated publicly that they believe they’ve cleaned up the federal government with their initial Accountability Act, and are sticking to that, despite all the evidence. The Liberals have pledged it; the NDP and the Bloc have always supported further measures to close loopholes. So likely, it won’t happen until another election. Hopefully, it will happen before, though. All it takes in a minority government is the opposition to cooperate, and they can pass anything they want, because they have a majority of MPs in the House. So that’s the big policy-making initiative. There are 90 loopholes still to close in the government system to make it democratic and accountable.

And then, we’re in the courts, challenging Prime Minister Harper over his election call in September 2008 as a violation of the fixed election-date law.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: There’s a lot of stuff happening this month, as well. Not on the accountability front in policy terms, but in the newspapers, politicians doing all kinds of crazy things—or at least being accused of those things. And the government ethics commissioner has been asked to look into a number of things. She’s chosen not to look into some. What do you think about that stuff? Does that keep you busy, too?

Duff Conacher: Very much so. Essentially, because these loopholes are in the system that allow dishonest, unethical, secretive, unrepresentative and wasteful behaviour, people exploit the loopholes. And so there’s usually a scandal a month or so, and if it’s not at the federal level it’s provincial or municipal, and we get calls on those as well, because we’re really the only group that works on those issues in Canada. And you have media calling, saying ‘what are the actual rules? What are the lines that can’t be crossed? What should the watchdog agencies be doing?’ And so I’ve been very busy working on those, and will continue to be. But what we focus on is that the system is the scandal. And if you close the loopholes, strengthen enforcement and penalties, you’ll discourage more people from doing this stuff. And we won’t have a scandal a month, and hopefully we will have government focusing on what it should be doing, which is solving problems in society instead of being caught up and dealing with all these scandalous activities. You won’t ever stop them, but you’ll discourage a lot more of them if you actually have effective laws and effective enforcement.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: You’ve been doing this since 1994 at Democracy Watch.

Duff Conacher: That’s right.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And right now, as you say, you’re the only group doing it. Does that surprise you?

Duff Conacher: It surprised us back then, when we started up, that there wasn’t a group already. At that time, 136 years had passed since Canada became a country. And no one ever thought that maybe we should have a group that advocates for democracy in Canada? Yeah, it was surprising then. There are other groups that have started, mostly think tanks that do the odd report. We’re the only real advocacy group, using all the different strategies of being out there, meeting with politicians, getting media coverage, and also going to court if we need to.

Why there isn’t the interest? I don’t know. People have given me different theories, one being that we had the New Democrats start when the whole issue of democratic reform was starting to become really hot in the late 60s and early 70s. They were sort of viewed as the group that would push for this. So we had a third party, unlike in the U.S., for example, that was pushing for these things. But they haven’t pushed very hard, actually. They’ve ignored a lot of issues we’ve taken up.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: But does it say anything about what the Canadian people think? I mean, you are very well informed when it comes to the Federal Accountability Act and a number of other federal pieces of legislation, but what about the laymen and the laywomen from coast to coast? Are they satisfied, do you think, with how things are looking from their end?

Duff Conacher: No. The polls show very clearly the hot button issue is lack of honesty in politics. People get baited with false promises during elections, and then the parties switch. Whichever party wins power breaks the promise and then lies about keeping the promises. And people are very upset about that. It’s the number one hot button government accountability issue; also the ethical behaviour; the secrecy; the waste, of course, because it’s waste of the public’s hard-earned money that they’re forced to pay in taxes; and then lack of representative decisions. You have different slices of the population upset about whatever issue, because they feel the government’s not doing the right thing. So the polls show wide concern, more than 80 percent of Canadians concerned about all of these areas.

The real gap is that they don’t necessarily vote and choose which party to vote on based on just this issue. And since politicians write the rules for themselves and they want to get into power, it sometimes isn’t top of mind for the politicians. And that’s why it’s been slow going and, I think, ignored for so many years. There’s also a general assumption that we were at the top of the world. And we hadn’t really been measured until measurement started in the mid-1990s showing that, actually, many other jurisdictions were way ahead of us on things like open government.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: You are the only group doing this. But I think it goes further than that, because I think, Duff, you are sort of the brand. Democracy Watch is Duff Conacher. And you’re the guy who hold press conferences and berates the government for doing these things. What do you think of that sort of career trajectory, where you’re now Ottawa’s government watchdog when it comes to ethics and accountability?

Duff Conacher: Well, we’re not the only ones on accountability if you talk broadly about it, because lots of groups watch specific decisions; like environmental groups watch decisions on environment, and if they think the process was really bad, they’ll point that out as well as point out that it was a bad decision overall. And we also bring lots of groups together in coalition. We’ve never had resources to have more than myself as a full-time staff person. So people get the impression that I’m the only one doing things, but we’ve had lawyers help us out pro bono; we have lots of volunteers doing research; we have active board members that help with the website and with networking. And as I say, we’ve formed four nationwide coalitions. So it is a bit unfortunate, because people get this impression that I’m the only one doing things and that I am Democracy Watch, but in fact it is an organization. We work with lots of partners, and we have lots of assistance. We have more than 100 citizen groups from across the country involved in our coalitions. They help with financial support and writing letters, and they testify before committees as well. So it is more of a movement, not in terms of financial resources, but in terms of people involved, than it may appear sometimes—because I’m always the one quoted in the media.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And you are quoted in the media quite a bit.

Duff Conacher: Yeah, that part’s gone well. But that’s part of what we focused on—working smart. We know that the ministers watch the media. We know that opinion makers do. And that influences, over time, voters’ opinions. And so we do focus on making news, so that we get in the headlines. And the way we do that is essentially by doing audits consistently. But also, the politicians generate a lot of news themselves, just because so many of them regularly act dishonestly, unethically, secretively, unrepresentatively or wastefully. So they create the news, and we’re called for our opinion. And because we’re experts on where the lines are and the rules they’re supposed to be following—or just want to point out that, yeah, it’s legal for them to do this but obviously shouldn’t be—we’re often called upon to comment.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I want to go back to the beginning of this process of watching the government and pointing out unethical behaviour and unaccountable behaviour. It was 1994, I guess, when you and others founded the group. How did that come together?

Duff Conacher: We actually opened the doors in September 1993. And the way that came together was, first of all, inspiration. I worked for Ralph Nader as an intern back in ’86 and ’87, and then went back to law school. I was working on safe drinking water issues with Nader, even though I had done my undergrad in English and had no expertise in the area. He has interns take a fresh look at things, even if they’re not experts. And I knew I wanted to go to law school, and he gave me a direction. I was more interested in his work on good government and corporate responsibility. Democracy Watch also works on, specifically, bank accountability as our major issue in corporate responsibility.

So I went through law school. I was looking for groups in Canada that do this—and didn’t find any. The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation works a bit on access to information and, of course, the waste issue, but not on the broader issue of democratic reform. And that was really the only group. The Council of Canadians claimed to work on it, but they didn’t specifically focus on democratic reforms. They focused on more substantive issues. And one of the projects I worked on with Nader was a book called Canada Firsts, a compilation of things Canadian have done first or foremost in the world. When I was at his office, that project fell in my lap because I was the only Canadian working there. And it became a number-one bestseller, and he very generously agreed to provide those proceeds as the seed funding for Democracy Watch. And through my work with student groups and others, I’d connected with a few other people and they agreed to be advisers or board members, and we all started it up in the fall of ‘93.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, you were a Nader’s Raider. Did you know any other Canadian Nader Raiders?

Duff Conacher: That’s actually how I ended up getting down there. My uncle was a pro hockey player, actually on the last Leafs team to win the Stanley Cup. He knew Ken Dryden. And I had been travelling Central America in ’85—came back and was looking around for something to do with non-profit NGOs, and he just happened to have a conversation with Ken Dryden at the time. Ken Dryden had actually worked for Nader while he was a goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens. He was going through law school—very impressive guy, now a federal MP—and he went down for a summer, which is the off-season for hockey players, and he worked for Nader. So he gave this idea to my uncle, passed it on to me, and I ended up down and working. And I found out then that there were other Canadians who had done the same thing, including one of our advisers who has also helped us out as a lawyer—a guy named David Baker in Toronto. I’ve helped a number of people since that time go down and be interns, including a couple of the founding board members—Aaron Freeman and Craig Forcese. They both did a stint in Nader’s office, as well.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Do you and the other Nader Raiders have a rapport that’s lasted throughout the years? That was 20 years ago – more than 20 years ago.

Duff Conacher: It is now, yeah, it’s true. It’s now 25 years ago this summer that I went down there. It’s a pretty common experience. Nader’s office, the specific one that I worked in that I’ve helped get others down to—Ken Dryden worked in a separate office—a lot of them worked in the same way. But Nader’s office … in a way, it’s kind of his brain. If he has something on his mind, an issue to take on, there are people working on various projects. But the office will mobilize to help a news conference be held any day, and there are usually 10 to 15 different people working on different issue—a fascinating place; lots of leading research and advocacy, and he’s been doing it himself now since ’63, and he started up the group in ’65. For him, it’s been 45 years.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: For you, it’s been a number of years—September of 1993 until now. On your website, you say you’ve made changes to over 100 different democratizing changes to 16 different pieces of federal legislation in six key areas—a number of victories that you’ve claimed. How much of a difference do you think you’ve made. Those are numbers, but just in terms of changing the culture?

Duff Conacher: Well, certainly with ethics, the standards are much higher than they used to be. The rules are stronger, the enforcement is stronger. And so the expectations are higher amongst the public. And I would say also in the area of political finance, there have been major changes that we’ve won, where there’s now a ban on donations from corporations, unions, other organizations. Individuals are limited to a fairly low amount. Those are the two biggest areas.

If we win our case on the fixed-election-date law, that will be a world’s first case, in terms of these kinds of measures—restricting a prime minister in a parliamentary system from calling snap elections. But it’s mainly in the areas of ethics and money in politics on the good government side. And then bank accountability, yeah, we’ve had some effect there as well, in terms of disclosure and some restrictions on what the banks can do. They have to treat customers more fairly. We’ve reduced some of the gouging. It is a big struggle. Politicians write the rules for themselves and also, the bank lobby is the strongest corporate lobby with the most resources of any in the country. But every year we’ve made a few more changes, and as long as you can do that, it’s worth continuing—and rewarding to continue, as well, because you’re actually making change.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What about that lingering culture in Ottawa where you have pollsters and lobbyists and government relations consultants—whatever they choose to style themselves as—who used to be members of parliament, or used to work for members of parliament, or used to fundraise for political parties, who now work for all of these organizations that are just down the street from the politicians. It’s a very in-crowd, and there’s a lot of influence. Obviously, that’s nothing new. But how can you change that?

Duff Conacher: It’s really difficult to change completely, because it’s a human system of relationships, and you can’t stop people from having relationships with each other, friends or otherwise. What we’re trying to do is eliminate—and we’ve won rule changes, we’ll see if they’ll be enforced—that say you can’t do anything for anyone, or give anything significant to anyone, who you’re lobbying. And we’ve won some cooling-off periods, where people now have to sit out, if they’re at the senior levels, for five years from becoming a registered lobbyist. There are still loopholes that are still technical loopholes in this, and I’m sure there are people exploiting those technical loopholes. And so we still have work to do in that area, but the general ethic now, and the guidelines that are in place, are that there has to be a separation in terms of favour trading—and that’s a step forward, if it’s actually enforced.

There are two test complaints right now, before the lobbying commissioner and the ethics commissioner. And if they rule properly, they will find a couple of lobbyists and cabinet [ministers] and MPs guilty. And that will send a warning shot across the bow to everybody that you have to really separate yourself, and you can’t be doing things for each other, because as the Supreme Court ruled in 1996, if you don’t have the separation between private interests and public interests, you don’t have a democracy. But it’s really difficult, because people know each other, they get to know each other, and just based on that, they get some inside access and get to the top of the line, the front of the line. And the average voter’s concerns get ignored, just because of that human system. And it’s really difficult to separate people who know each other.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Do you ever get overwhelmed when you’re going home at the end of the workday and think about how much work there is left to do?

Duff Conacher: Rarely, just because I remind myself of the resources we have—not just myself, but volunteers and everybody, and I’m realistic about what we can accomplish. I’m not a political junkie, because being a junkie in any way is not healthy. And so I don’t follow everything all the time, because it should, if you’re sane, drive you crazy. Because there is so much going on, and so many rumours and things swirling around, that to pay attention to it is just kind of a crazy mess given the number of people involved and the number of stories and rumours. Just try and work smart, focus on the things we can actually change, keep in mind that saying about having the wisdom to know the difference between the things you can change and the things you can’t, and just leave it behind when I leave the office, as well. It’s not easy, but I know it’s the only way to do it and remain healthy. If you burn out by trying to pay attention to everything all the time, then you just waste a ton of time, because all those years you’re burned out, you don’t get anything done. So better to just, you know, slowly chip away and focus on a few things and concentrate and ignore everything else, so you can still bring the energy to it and not get driven crazy and burned out.

Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch.

In this edition of Listen to This, Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviews Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, a non-partisan advocacy group that lobbies for greater government transparency, accountability, and democratic reform. Conacher is one of the best-known media personalities in the field, constantly called on by media outlets to talk about what really goes on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill. With their slogan “the system is the scandal,” Democracy Watch aims to identify, publicize, and pressure for the closure of legislative loopholes that allow waste, corruption, and abuse of power by elected officials and civil servants. He talks about the dynamics of the cozy relationship between lobbyists and politicians, Democracy Watch’s aggressive media strategy, the key role that Ralph Nader played in the founding of the group, and why he’s not a political junkie.

[Note: we’re posting this podcast a week earlier than scheduled because the issues that Conacher addresses are so much in the news at the moment, with the Guergis/Jaffer affair making daily headlines. Because of that change, the next podcast will be up in three weeks, not two.]

Toby Heaps demonstrates his style in Toronto. Photo by Steve Payne

Junue Millan is getting agitated.

It’s a hot day in May 2008, and Millan, an organizer on Ralph Nader’s quixotic presidential campaign, paces a downtown Los Angeles sidewalk. I’m sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep that has been on loan to the Nader cause this week, shuttling campaign volunteers around the city.

“Where is Toby?” he says to me. “Text him to hurry.” Toby Heaps is the reason I’m here. My old colleague is working for Nader and I’ve come to see how American democracy works — or doesn’t. As I hit “send” on the text message — “ETA? Junue’s getting stressed” — Heaps finally exits an office building across the street at a full sprint.

Heaps, a Canadian activist and entrepreneur, and national coordinator of the Nader 2008 presidential bid, disappeared an hour ago on some last-minute business required to get Nader on the ballot in California. All that needs to happen is for a notary to officiate a batch of campaign papers. Millan doesn’t understand why it’s taking so long.

Without this paperwork, Nader has little chance of getting on the ballot in vote-rich California, required to run a truly national campaign. So if these notarized papers aren’t dropped off at the L.A. County registrar’s office in Norwalk before it closes in an hour, weeks of work will be lost, and the alternative — collecting hundreds of thousands more signatures throughout the state — would cost time and money the campaign doesn’t have to spare.

“Uh-oh,” says Millan, “something is happening. Something bad is happening.”

Heaps is running full-speed across the street, chest out, legs pumping, fear on his face. He dives into the back seat of the Jeep, shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”

The notary, a spindly black man in a too-big, old-timey suit, is in hot pursuit. He looks like Richard Pryor would have had he lived to be 110, and despite his age and seeming frailty, he chases Heaps across the street, shouting clear and loud the whole time, “Call the po-lice! Call the po-lice! Call the po-lice!”

By the time the notary makes it to the vehicle, still shouting, a crowd of onlookers — including security officers, guns drawn — has gathered around the car.

A tough-looking six-foot-plus-tall bystander addresses Heaps, now cowering in the back seat: “Give back what you took from that man. I saw you. You stole something and took off running. Whatever it is, give it back.”

My eyes are fixed on the gun-wielding security officers while Heaps hastily explains that the issue is payment. The notary wanted cash for his services; Heaps had none, so he tried — unsuccessfully — to negotiate another arrangement; an invoice, a credit card, anything. “He just kept saying, ‘I want my money, I want my money,’” says Heaps, the precious sheaf of documents clutched to his chest. “He doesn’t take MasterCard.” Then, turning to me: “Can I borrow $300?”

Welcome to Toby’s world.

Toby Heaps is a bundle of contradictions. Trained in economics, he’s a workaholic idealist with a mischievous streak, a vegetarian who’s spent time in the army, an athlete who won’t lock up his bike because of his fundamental faith in human nature (he’s been through 28 bikes in his 32 years — “not a bad ratio,” he says).

Heaps is best known in Canada as editor of the Toronto-based business magazine Corporate Knights, which focuses on what it calls “responsible business,” and is distributed quarterly in the Globe and Mail. Heaps founded the magazine seven years ago on the philosophy that businesses need to be rated and ranked on the quality of their behaviour. He’s a fan of the “carrot and stick” approach: good companies should be rewarded and recognized; bad ones named and shamed. Corporate Knights does both. The tactic is controversial, but Heaps has surprising influence.

Corporate Knights is a kind of lobby group as well as a magazine, and its full range of activities is not necessarily obvious to those outside its inner circle. Since the beginning, Heaps has sought to use the magazine as a vehicle to influence policy.

In addition to rating Canadian companies in the magazine, CK also does an international list of Global 100 companies, which is launched each year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Three years ago, when Brian Mulroney was named “Greenest Prime Minister” in Canadian history, it was Corporate Knights that was behind the honour. The magazine organized the gala in Ottawa, attended by new prime minister Stephen Harper and hosted by Rick Mercer.

The Tory hugging and business boosting have put off some of Heaps’ leftish colleagues, who accuse CK of corporate cheerleading. An economist for the Canadian Auto Workers, Jim Stanford, for instance, respects Heaps’ entrepreneurial spirit — he thinks the left would be better off if more people were as energetic and creative as Heaps — but the two men do fundamentally disagree.

“The corporations view Corporate Knights, clearly, as a way that they can put an ad in to extol their social consciousness, but without having to do necessarily much more than that,” says Stanford. “The problem is that the whole corporate social responsibility movement is based on volunteerism, public relations, and consumer choice, and explicitly steers away from regulations, taxes, unions.”

But Heaps believes in the work he’s doing and the change he wants to see. He ignores obstacles and is ambitious in the extreme. It makes him a constant source of both frustration and inspiration for those who work closely with him.

“He’s so fast. He sees opportunities and pounces on them at times without thinking. He’s fearless,” says Corporate Knights publisher Karen Kun.

The magazine is just one of many social-improvement schemes Heaps has on the go at any given time, including a geothermal power venture in Canada and a solar-electricity scheme in Ghana. Heaps has built a small activist empire out of his enigmatic persona: he’ll rollerblade to business meetings, and depending who he’s dealing with, they don’t know whether to expect him to arrive in Birkenstocks or a suit. (In fact, he’s a golf-shirt-and-slacks kind of guy most of the time.) For non-crucial meetings, he has a reputation for being late — sometimes by several hours.

“Genius and craziness go hand in hand many times,” says Peter Diplaros, Heaps’ long-time friend and former colleague. “The amount of influence and respect that Toby’s been able to garner is vastly disproportionate to his age, so he must be doing something right.”

“He’s not your typical person,” say Kun, emphatically. “At all.”

Which makes him a perfect match for Ralph Nader.

In all the drama surrounding last year’s U.S. election, it was easy to miss the fact that Ralph Nader was running for president at all. Reviled by Democrats over the perception that he cost Al Gore the White House in 2000, Nader ran again in 2004 anyway and fared considerably worse, pulling in a microscopic 0.4 per cent of the popular vote nationwide.

But he remained undeterred. In early 2008, three days before his 74th birthday, the consumer advocate officially announced his candidacy on MSNBC’s Meet the Press. “Dissent is the mother of assent,” he told host Tim Russert, “and in that spirit … I am running for president.”

It seems inevitable that Heaps and Nader would have met. The two crusaders are obvious kin. Stubborn, relentlessly idealistic, they even look alike. Other campaigners tease that Heaps is the son that Nader never had. When I ask Heaps if he’s noticed the similarities between himself and his mentor, he just grins: “Yup.” That’s all he’s going to say about that. So, what happens, then, when you put Heaps and Nader together to plot something?

“Oh my god. You get chaos. But you get some fireworks … ideas are just coming out rapid-fire,” he says. “But Ralph is as scattergun in his approach as I’ve ever seen. He makes me look like a focused bazooka. But he’s one of these guys who can fire a scattergun and still hit the bull’s eye with most of the bullets. Or at least for a large part of his life he could, when he had the resources.”

The two men first spoke at length in 2002, shortly after Heaps founded Corporate Knights. Heaps wanted to interview his hero for the magazine, but Nader is as hard to reach as Heaps is persistent. “I phoned him about 60 times over the course of a month,” says Heaps. “And then finally he phoned me back while I was out getting a bagel.”

Over the course of the conversation, their shared interests became clear, and a week later a box of assorted books arrived, COD. “Books on credit-card fraud, all kinds of things,” recalls Heaps. “They were pretty good books, but I paid the mailing costs. That’s how he does things. He pays for the books; I pay for the shipping, even though I didn’t ask for them. That’s classic Ralph. He’s cheap, man.”

A few months later, Heaps invited Nader to come speak at a Corporate Knights-sponsored round table. The invitees were mostly CEOs, and Heaps wanted to prevent the conference from becoming too self-congratulatory — the famously blunt Nader obliged with a scolding address.

Politics, along with trouble-making and agitation, are in Heaps’ blood: his great-grandfather was A. A. Heaps, one of the leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike, who later became an MP and helped bring about Canada’s old-age pension and unemployment insurance. His father, Adrian Heaps, is a Toronto city councillor. Most of the people close to him believe he will go into politics. Maybe, he says, but not for a while yet. “It would be way less interesting to go into politics without substantial accomplishments behind you and a real steely resolve for a couple of things you wanted to do,” he says.

“If you get in without that, you end up doing not much of anything, I think. Which is what most politicians do.”

Nader, of course, is an exception. In 2003, Heaps offered to help Nader out in the event of another presidential bid, not really expecting to be held to his promise. “I tried to encourage him to run with Erin Brockovich in 2004 as his running mate,” says Heaps. “I told him if he ran to give me a call — I had no idea at that point what I was committing myself to.”

When Nader called a year later, “I just took off,” says Heaps. “I had my BlackBerry and my laptop and I was living in a tent for a while, so I was running Corporate Knights out of a tent with a BlackBerry.” Heaps criss-crossed the United States, collecting nomination signatures in mall parking lots and county fairs. “The agreement was that I’d go down for a few weeks. And one turned into two, turned into three, turned into four,” explains Heaps. “So I spent about six weeks with my car rental — 24,000 kilometres later I brought it back.”

After the election, Heaps returned to running CK and pursuing his other projects, but in summer 2007 it all started again with a call from Nader’s assistant asking for help. “I see the number and I’m like, ‘Aw, bugger.’ I know what it’s about,” recalls Heaps. Even through it would overturn his life yet again, it didn’t take Heaps long to commit to hitting the Nader trail one more time — his respect for the man and the mission trumping his better judgment.

“His fingerprints are everywhere on any kind of case law, and on any kind of progressive bills that have been passed in the last 30, 40 years,” Heaps says. “Nader is the most qualified human being, given his experience in America, to be president.”

While Heaps and Nader make a great team, on the surface their politics don’t exactly match. The overall pro-business outlook of Corporate Knights stands in stark contrast to the anti-corporate rhetoric of the Nader campaign. During the appearance on Meet the Press where he announced his candidacy, for instance, Nader referred to Washington as “corporate occupied territory,” referred to “corporate crime,” and used that favourite term of the anti-free-trade movement, “corporate globalization.” Despite the apparent differences, Heaps is happy straddling two roles, alternating between boardroom schmoozer and anticorporate crusader. He sees the two worlds as intimately connected. “Ralph’s saying, let’s fix the system — and he means right from the top, from the White House, which is the ultimate governance structure,” he says. “Whereas Corporate Knights, at least by its name, is more focused on changing that system within the boardrooms of corporate Canada. It’s not one or the other. You’ve got to do both.”

Working for Nader, Heaps gets to let loose a bit, too. “The rhetoric is a bit more anti-corporate than I think is fair, or than I believe myself,” he says. “But because I try to be so careful about the corporate egos [in Canada], it’s kind of fun to go into a world where the egos just have big bull’s eyes on them, and there are no rules about going after them … Basically, we’re playing chess here in Canada and when I go to work for Ralph, the gloves come off. The brass knuckles come on.”

In May 2008, I travel to Los Angeles to see what my friend and former colleague is up to in the United States. Our original plan had been to meet up in Washington, D.C., but Heaps called at the last minute to say he was on the West Coast instead, working on a plan to get Nader on the ballot in California. I’m not surprised, so I’m not annoyed. With Toby, sometimes it’s best to be Zen.

As my plane taxis to the gate at LAX, I give him a call. “Okay, so where am I going?” I ask.

“I’m in South Central L.A. You know, where the Rodney King riots happened,” he jokes. “I’m in a grocery-store parking lot. You’ll have no trouble spotting me — I’ll be the only honky here.” An hour later, I arrive at the Superior Super Warehouse at Western and Manchester, and Heaps, wearing a blue Nader ’08 Tshirt, is indeed easy to spot as he chugs a mango energy drink, kicks an errant soccer ball back to a child, and registers a voter. He is grinning, as usual.

It’s odd that one of Nader’s right-hand men is a Canadian, but it makes some sense given that Canada has much of what the Nader campaign would like for the United States: single-payer health care, a multi-party system, an international reputation as a peacekeeper, and so on. Heaps’ colleagues on the Nader trail tease him that he’s trying to import democracy from home. His friends in Canada generally think he’s wasting his time.

John, another campaigner, arrives at Superior Super Warehouse from Wal-Mart, where he’s been collecting signatures all afternoon. In order to get Nader on the ballot in California, the team is registering voters, and Nader’s pariah status makes it a difficult sell. John is surprised to see Heaps wearing his Nader campaign shirt because it’s more difficult to get people to stop when they see the candidate’s name.

From the outside, it may seem insane, this persistence in working on an obviously lost cause. But Nader’s supporters (and there are still a surprisingly large number of them) are driven by dedication to the issues he represents and the lack of an alternative. They believe history will recognize their efforts to break open the two-party system in the United States, and they fight hard. These are true believers, which is why they will stand in supermarket parking lots taking abuse and scorn just for the sake of a few more signatures to support their candidate. In the end, they get the signatures they need. Working on the Nader campaign leaves volunteers feeling they have contributed to the world, and it can also make for some great stories. Like that time a misunderstanding with a notary led to guns coming out.

At Heaps’ request to borrow $300 to pay the notary, I put my hand into my bag, and one of the gun-wielding security guards barks, “Don’t go reaching for anything.” I put my hands up, explain that I’m looking for my bank card, and ask for permission to exit the vehicle. A security guard trails me down the block and across the street to the closest bank.

Back in the Jeep, I hand the money to Heaps, still guarding his documents. The cash counted out through the window, the problem is resolved: the notary says a polite thank you and walks away. With the bystander still yelling for us to wait for the police, Millan pulls away and we speed toward the registrar’s office. Traffic is mercifully light, and we make it on time, filing the petitions with two minutes to spare.

Just outside Norwalk, Heaps calls Nader to share the good news. When he hangs up, he relays a compliment that makes the mission feel worthwhile: “Ralph says, ‘Good work, guys.’”

It was a small victory, but as in 2004, President Ralph Nader was never really a possibility.

In January 2009, shortly before Barack Obama’s inauguration, I meet Heaps to talk about the outcome of the election. “Barack Obama won the election in spite of our efforts. Ralph Nader did not,” Heaps deadpans. “We’re all a little disappointed.”

Joking aside, Heaps is still feeling raw from the results. Nader pulled less than one per cent of the total — about 700,000 votes. This despite CNN polls putting him at four per cent a week before the election. He got substantially more votes than in 2004, but that’s because Nader was on the ballot in more states than last time around — California in particular.

I ask Heaps if there was any part of him that believed Nader could actually win, and he takes a long time to respond, thinking, grinning, formulating. “In the very deep recesses,” he says and laughs.

It’s that combination of smarts and naïveté, a faith many would call foolish (the same one that keeps losing him all those bikes), that makes Heaps a force. He lacks that part of the brain that says things are impossible, and while his friends and co-workers sometimes find it maddening, it allows him to accomplish things that others wouldn’t even bother attempting. In addition to the magazine and his green-energy ventures in Toronto and Ghana, Heaps is trying to get a Corporate Knights think tank off the ground. His association with Nader got him a shared byline on a Wall Street Journal op-ed, too, advising Obama to push for an international carbon tax, a policy Heaps has been advocating for years.

Overall, the Nader campaign was worthwhile, Heaps says, if for no other reason than to remind our benighted American neighbours about the important issues the two main parties wouldn’t touch. While Heaps may still be smarting from the election outcome, he’s got plenty of distractions to keep him busy. For example, today he’s waging war against Big Potash — a legal cartel of fertilizer companies that have together raised prices beyond the reach of farmers in the developing world. He’s spent the morning on the phone asking hard questions in his quest for damning information. It’s the kind of chase Heaps lives for, another day in Toby’s world. As he says, “Greed undoes them every time.”